Comment by chrisco255 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chrisco255 | Hacker News Reader

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You can't stop climate change. It has been happening for billions of years. Records of floods and droughts (and subsequent wildfires) exist in Australia since it was colonized. There are naturally occurring dynamics that influence the patterns of rain across the world. At one point the Sahara was able to support vegetation, but whatever rain was falling on the Sahara at that time probably caused a prolonged drought in some other part of the world.

You need several ingredients to get wildfires: 1) lack of H2O 2) wind 3) either lightning or human-caused flames to reach the 500F+ necessary to trigger combustion 4) an abundance of dry vegetation in close proximity

Notice CO2 has no effect on any of the above, except indirectly. CO2 acts as plant fertilizer, so it causes photosynthesis to work more efficiently, and therefore more plant growth occurs overall in the entire planet. While more plant growth is a good thing, it also provides more fuel for wildfires when droughts inevitably occur.

EDIT: I know alarmists are sensitive to facts, but your assertion that humans cause rain to either fall or not fall over given areas is rooted in superstition, not science. It's one you share with your pre-Renaissance ancestors who were prone to witch burning and human sacrifice to try to combat drought.

I know the general internet advice is to not feed the trolls but I'll bite this time.

We know a few things:

* Based on historical temperature readings we know that the climate is now changing at a massively faster rate than the normal rate of change over billions of years.

* A hotter climate increases the risk of bushfires

* More co2 in the atmosphere creates a greenhouse effect that creates a warmer climate

* A warmer climate can store more moisture in the air leading to longer periods of no rain followed by massive downpours (https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/moisture-holding-capacity...)

* The Australian firefighters have reported that this fire season they have had much less time for reduction burns because the land spends more time being too wet to burn or far too dry to safely burn compared to previous years.

These facts have been confirmed repeatedly over the decades by actual experts. Either you have fallen victim to corporate propaganda or you have something to lose from the changes that will be required to prevent climate change.

Like all good lies, this one starts with a piece of truth. There have always been fires in Australia, where the truth stops is forgetting to mention that there have not always been fires of this scale, with fire seasons running this long.

Too late to edit my original comment but after checking the poster above me I can see that they were actually educated on the link between rainfall and climate change just 2 days ago by someone much more qualified and with papers published. It looks like this poster is a troll attempting to spread misinformation.

I'm not a troll, I'm a well educated individual and fully capable of engaging in a rational and intelligent discussion, assuming you have rational and intelligent arguments to make and not ad hominen attacks.

No. It is not changing faster than any time in history. The end of the ice age regularly saw temperature swings of 8-12C in global average temps in as little as a few decades. See Dansgaard-Oesger events, the Younger Dryas, etc. Also look into the early Holocene, where temps were markedly warmer than modern temps for more than 5000 years. This coincided with the advent of agriculture. But if you want to talk about post Bronze age climate events there's the Minoan Warm period, the Roman Warm period and the Medieval Warm period...all warmer than modern temps (all associated with boom times by the way). And then of course there's the sometimes dramatic cooling events in between, which are associated with droughts, disease and bad times for humanity.

Moderate heat does not increase odds of wildfires. The heat is a side effect of drought, which is the actual catalyst for wildfires. The wet tropics (rainforest) rarely experience wildfires unless induced by slash and burn techniques caused by humans. It is very hard to burn wet wood. I advise you to try it. Meanwhile it is very easy to burn dry wood in even the coldest regions of the earth, which is why burning wood has been used to keep humanity warm since the early stone age.

H2O is by far the strongest greenhouse gas and it not only can influence the climate in its gaseous water vapor form but it also exists naturally in the form of ice and liquid in massive quantities (the oceans). These oceans have Multi-decadal and multi-centennial oscillations that have dramatic influences on both temperatures and rainfall patterns around the world. Some of the most well documented ones are the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation but they are by no means the only way that oceans influence climate.

Warmer air can store more moisture in the air. Sure, it's called humidity, what of it? Rain falls from way up in the atmosphere where it is much, much cooler than surface temperatures on land.

Your assertion that increased humidity causes more droughts and reduced rainfall is dubious and not backed up by the existence of rainforests in humid tropical regions.

> At one point the Sahara was able to support vegetation

Yes, the Earth has changed significantly over millions of years or even millennia. The point that our climate is changing is not new, it's how fast it's changing that's the problem.

Animals and ecosystems are great at adapting on those long time scales, but not so much within only a few generations or a hundred years.

So yes, if you point out that there have been floods, droughts and fires in Australia forever, we agree. If you think Australia's climate is going to change over the next 200 years as slowly as it did the previous 200 years if we continue to emit current levels of greenhouses gasses we disagree there.

Maybe the more appropriate term is "accelerated climate change" since as you point out the Earth does transform naturally over extremely long periods of time.

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